Jason Rantanen is the David L. Hammer and Willard L. "Sandy" Boyd Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and Director of the Iowa Innovation, Business & Law Center.

He writes in the areas of patent law, federal courts, civil procedure, and empirical legal studies. Professor Rantanen has authored numerous articles and book chapters that address the law from practical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, and his scholarship has appeared in the USC Law Review, Florida Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, American University Law Review, Michigan State Law Review, and Stanford Technology Law Journal, among others. He is also a co-author of the widely-read PatentlyO law blog.

In addition to his teaching and scholarship work, Professor Rantanen is the faculty advisor for the Iowa Intellectual Property Law Society student group and the College of Law’s combined degree students, and directs the Master of Legal Studies program and the Innovation, Business & Law Center. He also serves on the law school's internal procedures committee and the university's Faculty Judicial Commission. Professor Rantanen is a member of the American Law Institute.

Professor Rantanen’s recent publications include Who Appeals (and Wins) Patent Infringement Cases, co-authored with Charles Neff, Eweosa Owenaze, and Allison Williamson, in the Houston Law Review and Studying Patent Infringement Litigation in the Research Handbook on Empirical Studies in Intellectual Property Law, edited by Estelle Derclaye.  He is also the creator of the Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions, the largest and most comprehensive publicly available dataset on decisions by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Introduction to Intellectual Property: Cases and Questions, an open-access textbook, and Rules & Laws for Civil Actions, an open-access set of rules and statutes for Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, Evidence, and Constitutional Law courses, with Stella Burch Elias, Derek Muller, Caroline Sheerin and Maya Steinitz.

Professor Rantanen will teach Patent Law in Fall 2023 and Civil Procedure and Introduction to Intellectual Property in Spring 2024.

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Practice and Teaching: 

• Patent Law
• Introduction to Intellectual Property
• Trademarks and Unfair Competition
• Administrative Law
• Civil Procedure

Affiliations: 

• Innovation, Business & Law Center